It is well recognized that mental or physical disorders in the preschool child can often prevent the child's normal educational development throughout his school years. Corrective measures are known for many of these disorders and becoming increasingly available whereby the problem, once detected, may be partially or wholly compensated by special education programs or otherwise. Thus, it becomes increasingly important to provide a system for early detection of such difficulties in the child so that corrective measures may be started.
Also, the readiness of a child to undertake a particular level of basic schoolwork is an important parameter to know in advance so that the child receives the most appropriate initial schooling. Readiness is not necessarily a function of age, but is affected by social and cultural background, as well as the child's basic talents.
Heretofore, the common means for evaluating child readiness and for detecting these disorders, or at least detecting the probability of their presence in a given child, was to have a highly trained adult testing specialist administer to each child a lengthy set of intelligence and physical tests aimed at evaluating the psychological and intellectual capabilities of each child. In such a situation, it is important to maintain as uniform a test climate as is possible from child to child in order that there be no bias in the answers reflecting the individual administration of each test. It is thus important that the test administrator be highly skilled in child psychology, as well as the particular characteristics of the test being administered. In addition, and to complete the analysis of the preschool child, the family pediatrician may be asked to evaluate specific hearing and vision characteristics of the child, or a further set of special tests are administered by screening specialists to determine the existence of hearing or vision difficulties. The use of such highly trained personnel for a lengthy set of tests on each child becomes an expensive but necessary process if each child is to fully benefit from his education.
Where heretofore machine, automated testing systems have been extensively used for adult screening to reduce the cost of test administration, the use of such automated testing systems with the preschool child has been limited by the less developed understanding and reasoning ability of the child.